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Talk:Alchemy/@comment-94.175.152.22-20141217222909/@comment-24.107.7.208-20160105002955
"They just happen to live in the same house." But that's kind of the dumbed-down lay explanation that Simmon gives. I have chemistry BS so, to me, it doesn't sound right. It's like how a lot of Sygaldry is actually practical mechanical engineering but also happens to use Sympathy. By that analogy you would say that they aren't related, they just happen to live in the same house. But then again you STILL need to know a lot of the mechanical engineering otherwise you're a crap artificer. And I expect alchemy is much the same way. You need the chemistry or you're a crap alchemist and clearly a lot of chemistry is involved. Plumbob is a sedative that requires a lot of lead in its factoring process and highly distilled water is still required for whatever solutions alchemists are needing to use. I have kind of a very vague idea of what alchemy might be though and it's very bizarre. But I suppose no more bizzare than staring at objects and shuttling energy around using willpower. Principles are basically physical properties or rules of behavior that objects have innately. For practical purposes, these are the chemicals in a lab. You can "unbind" the principles using "factoring," using a process I suspect is similar to Sympathy. Meaning, I think it still requires the use of an Alar to shuttle principles around from compound to compound. You can rip a "principle" from a compound and then shunt it off somewhere else. This alters how the base compound behaves chemically/physically and the properties of whatever compound you choose to factor the principle to. I don't think principles are as simple as, "This object is red" that you can rip off a red object then send to another object to make it red. Too simple. You're messing with the fundamental physics of how structures made of electron clouds bend incident light. And who knows what that entails? You could be messing with basic rules of physical chemistry and particle physics altogether. Which means that you're altering all your reaction products in unpredictable ways. You can mix A+B to get C+D. You rip something from "A" to make "C" red. "D" is a waste product ("A" might not be red though). Unfortunately, both your desired and waste product have unpredictable secondary effects now that you've gotten through them. So while "C" might otherwise make an otherwise inexpensive and beautiful red dye, it might also be, for example horrendously toxic. Woops. And that's an oversimplification as well, because it might as be a multi-step reaction where you need dozens of reagents and a lot of flitering and distillation in between to make the ingredients you need for the next step. Because you might need one or more principles for a dozen different compounds so that you can create a designer compound as your final product. (And who knows what the cross interactions of those dozen different principles are when you finally stick them into your end product?) Suffice it to say, I expect any alchemy that ambitious frequently winds up with a poisoned or blown up alchemist.